Continuing to cultivate AI, the Snapdragon 8 Gen4 was revealed to be redesigned

Ray Technology

2024-05-14 18:10Published in Guangdong science and technology creators

Calculating the time, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 has been released for more than half a year, and according to past conventions, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 should have almost completed its design and is ready to enter the testing stage.

However, there seem to have been some changes this year, and according to the latest revelations, Qualcomm has decided to redesign the Snapdragon 8 Gen4 to make it "more competitive".

 (Source: X)

For this news, Xiaolei is actually not surprised, as MediaTek and Apple's next-generation processor data have been exposed, judging from the previously leaked data of Snapdragon 8 Gen4, it is not easy to gain an advantage in the competition.

Taking MediaTek as an example, as early as April, it was reported that the Dimensity 9400 will continue the radical all-large core design to provide users with strong performance support. As for Apple's A18/Pro, although the traditional performance data currently exposed is not outstanding, Apple has been hinting that the A18 series processors will focus more on the improvement of AI functions.

For example, the A18 Pro has been revealed to have been rolled back to the design stage, and Apple is making more adjustments to this new flagship processor to increase the number of core cores of the Neural Engine, so that the A18 Pro can be significantly different from the previous generation processor in terms of AI performance.

Obviously, the redesign of the Snapdragon 8 Gen4 has a lot to do with the information exposed by the A18 Pro. Whether it's Qualcomm or Apple, both obviously want to achieve more advantages in the field of AI.

A new round of ARM chip wrestling

In the past two years, the performance of mobile phone chips has increased more than many people expected, taking the Snapdragon series as an example, the performance of Snapdragon 8 Gen1 to Snapdragon 8 Gen3 has increased by nearly 200%.

Looking at the Geekbench 6 test data, you can see that the Snapdragon 8 Gen1 has a single-core performance of only 1229, while the multi-core performance is 3828. The Snapdragon 8 Gen3, released two years later, has improved the performance to a level of more than 2300 single-core and 7400 multi-core, even if it is limited by power consumption and heat dissipation in actual use, the actual single-core performance is also above 2200, and the multi-core performance is above 7000.

In the previously exposed data, the single-core performance of Snapdragon 8 Gen4 is 2845, and the multi-core performance is as high as 10628, compared with Snapdragon 8 Gen3, the progress in multi-core performance is very obvious, but the improvement of single-core performance is not as expected, and AppleA18 Pro's single-core 3500 score is compared with the obvious gap.

(Source: cnbeta)

In order to make up for the gap in single-core performance as much as possible, the whistleblower said that Qualcomm's redesigned Snapdragon 8 Gen4 will set the target frequency at 4.26GHz, according to the previously exposed super-large core with a main frequency of 4.3GHz, Xiaolei guessed that the redesigned target frequency should be a large core.

Considering that the Snapdragon 8 Gen4 will return to Snapdragon's self-developed all-large-core architecture (2 super-cores + 6 large-cores), the new version of the Snapdragon 8 Gen4 will be a "big baby" with a 2*4.30GHz super-core + 6*4.26GHz large-core design.

It is expected that the redesigned Snapdragon 8 Gen4 will further improve in multi-core performance, and some netizens speculate that the theoretical multi-core performance of the final product may exceed 11,000 points.

On paper alone, the Snapdragon 8 Gen4 is not far behind even when compared to the Snapdragon X Elite, which as a PC processor, has a single-core score of 2774 and a multi-core score of 14254 in Geekbench 6, which is still due to the 50% more cores than the Snapdragon 8 Gen4.

(Source: PC World)

If you compare the Snapdragon 8 Gen4 with the last two years of mobile PC processors, you will find that its performance is already equivalent to the i7-1360P released in the first quarter of 2023. Under the crazy involution of ARM processors, the processor performance of PC and mobile phones seems to have reached a historic intersection.

Although the Snapdragon 8 Gen4, Dimensity 9400, and Apple A18 Pro have not yet been officially announced, the smoke of war has already begun to fill.

All for AI?

As we all know, AI has become the core of the next generation of smartphones, and to some extent, AI performance is even more important than traditional computing performance. For most users, current flagship processors have a surplus of traditional performance, while AI performance is in the ascendant.

For flagship phones, AI performance has become the core of the competition. The AI performance of mobile phone SoCs is often determined by three parts: CPU, GPU, and NPU, of which NPU accounts for the highest proportion and is also the most difficult to modify in the middle of the design.

(Source: Zhihu)

Because NPU is different from traditional computing cores such as CPUs and GPUs, it does not simply rely on the core frequency to improve or decrease performance, but relies more on architecture optimization and the number of cores.

This is not difficult to explain why Qualcomm wanted to improve AI performance, but did not choose to change the NPU, but chose the method of saving the country with a curve, and instead improved the overall performance of the CPU. As we mentioned earlier, AI performance is the sum of the computing power of the three computing cores, and although the CPU is lower than the NPU and GPU in the ranking, it acts as the center of the system.

On the one hand, the CPU can provide part of the performance to the NPU for auxiliary computing through heterogeneous computing, and on the other hand, sufficient multi-core performance also allows the CPU to allocate tasks more quickly and dynamically coordinate the computing power of the entire system.

As the proportion of AI in mobile phone systems increases, the number of AI functions that need to be mobilized simultaneously in daily use also increases, and how to better allocate these tasks will also become a problem to consider.

Therefore, I think Qualcomm is also deliberately promoting the multi-core performance of mobile phone SoCs, in contrast to Apple's A18 Pro, which is limited by the core power consumption problem caused by excessive single-core performance, and chooses to reduce multi-core performance to ensure that the overall power consumption is within a controllable range.

(Source: X)

If the performance of the Apple A18 Pro is as previously exposed, then the Snapdragon 8 Gen4 is expected to lead it by more than 20% in multi-core performance alone, and its performance in the face of multitasking requirements will be significantly better than the A18 Pro.

There is no doubt that this year's mobile phone market will usher in a qualitative change, Qualcomm, MediaTek and Apple's wrestling, will make this year's flagship mobile phone in AI performance and the previous generation has a fault-like gap, with the mobile phone manufacturers in AI, Xiaolei can foresee a storm in the mobile phone market, has been brewing.

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